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Monday, 24 January 2011

Scientific discourse and social media

A few days ago, Nature published this interesting piece on how social media, blogs and particularly Twitter has quickly changed the context of academic publishing and "open review" (what we academics outside of natural science and biomedicine call public debate). Going by the article, it seems to me that the scientific world has a surprisingly hard time coming to grips with the situation that criticism of scientific publications can no longer be screened by editors and that scientific discussion, as a result, is no longer an activity reserved for a chosen few. Nevertheless, an interesting read with several engaging examples and opinions worth considering.